What Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal inflicted on us last Monday was just cruel.

Kobe moving into fifth on the NBA’s all-time scoring list is a notable achievement, for certain. Passing a player of Shaq’s magnitude is worth everybody celebrating, even without the history between them.

But nobody needed to be reminded of the history between them.

Worse, nobody needed to be reminded of the history they turned away from.

Go ahead. Insist with absolute certainty and unshakeable confidence that Shaq and Kobe staying together beyond the 2003-04 season guaranteed nothing about how many more championships they could have won together. You won’t be alone. You’ve got some evidence on your side.

Shaq was no longer the same player the rest of the decade, and became more of an albatross than a dominator during his over-extended, unintentional farewell tour through the league. Kobe, meanwhile, became the kind of player a championship team could build around, just as he’d claimed and believed, to the extreme.

Their relationship, if you could call it that, was too far gone at the end, the rift widening into a canyon. The break was inevitable and irreparable. What they wrung out of their eight years together was all there ever would be.

Keep telling yourself that.

But, truth be told, nobody will ever know.

And telling ourselves that there weren’t two or three more O’Brien trophies in their futures together in purple and gold, makes that eternal unknown easier to live with.

It keeps us from feeling as if we got robbed -- that Shaq and Kobe stole an epic era of NBA history from us.

In congratulating Kobe last week, on the night that Kobe supplanted him during a game in Philadelphia, Shaq did nothing more than twist the knife.

“Congrats to Kobe for being the greatest laker ever," Shaq tweeted. “Thanks for making us the greatest laker one two punch ever and congrats on passing me up 2.’’

There have been few things more enjoyable during his time on the public stage than Shaq unburdening his thoughts. But this time, Superman, Big Aristotle, Mr. Quotacious, we needed you to shut up.

Missing three or four (or five or six) more years of Shaq and Kobe turning their wrath on the league, in between turning it on each other, is more painful than seeing them do it had been joyful. Even if you hated them and the Lakers -- and yes, kids, you can take the “haters” of LeBron and the Heat, multiply them by 100 and you’d be halfway to the rage those championship Lakers teams generated -- you couldn’t turn away.

As for the notion that the union couldn’t have produced an even longer dynasty than the 2000-02 three-peat? Oh, please, we’ve been over that before. You like your indicators, but these ones are stronger: Shaq won a ring just two years after the split, with a lesser Heat team. Kobe won two more, five years later.

The consensus seems to be that without the Big Lead Weight, Kobe became all that he could be. Greatest Laker ever? A case has been made (not a great one, not as long as Magic Johnson remains on the all-time roster, but still). You can’t take the five rings from him, particularly not the two post-Shaq ones.

Post-Shaq rings, apparently, have much greater value than any other kind, although most of the other winners in the history of this sport never thought to make that kind of distinction. (Can’t ever remember Havlicek saying his career wouldn’t be complete until he won some hardware without Russell dragging him down. Same with Magic starving to win a couple on his own without Kareem in the way. Oops, did I bring up Magic again?)

FROM SI

That apparently matters to some people. The current No. 5 all-time scorer, for one.

Today, of course. Shaq is in the studio. Kobe is trying to drag his aging, disjointed Lakers back to the top with a coach he doesn’t seem in sync with, with knees, ankles and wrists betraying him, and with guards fresh off the waiver wire and the D-League out-dueling him at Madison Square Garden.

The years catch up to everybody.

With a couple of extra championships and an extra-indelible legacy as teammates to look back on, those years could be much more enjoyable.

But, as Shaq and Kobe reminded us, while their separate paths crossed on the scoring list, we’ll never know.